A Five-Phase Induction Motor drive with a GaN-Based Open-end Winding Multilevel Inverter

This paper presents a five-phase induction motor drive based on an asymmetrical open-end winding multilevel inverter. The machine is fed from both ends of the winding by a three-level T-Type inverter and a conventional two-level inverter. The T-Type inverter is driven by a low frequency modulation technique to minimize the switching power losses, while the two-level inverter working as an active power filter exploits GaN power devices to achieve a switching frequency of some hundreds of kHz. The two-level inverter is also tasked to balance the voltage across the T-type DC link capacitors. A suitable current control strategy has been implemented to perform separately the torque control and the voltage balancing control. Numerical simulations have been carried out to demonstrate the performance of the proposed topology and to compare it with a five-phase three-level T-type inverter with a wye connected load.